‘Now I owned a private war’: Lee Miller and the female journalists who broke battlefield rules

In August 1944, the photographer and war journalist Lee Miller was sent to France to report on conditions in the newly liberated port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany. But, as it rapidly became clear, some intelligence wires had got crossed. Far from being liberated, much of Saint-Malo was still a violent war zone, with US soldiers under heavy fire as they battled to dislodge the occupying Germans.

At this point in the second world war, around 200 women had, like Miller, gained military accreditation with the allied forces. Yet as Miller well knew, none of them were meant to be reporting on scenes of actual fighting, since their brief was simply to write the “softer” stories of war, about hospitals, air raid wardens and civilian heroism. If Miller chose to remain in Saint-Malo, she would certainly be punished, yet it was too fabulous an opportunity for her to miss. “I was the only photographer for miles around,” she said, “and now I owned a private war.” For five exhilarating days, aided and abetted by the Americans and sometimes coming under fire herself, she observed and photographed everything.

Miller had never felt so alert, so fully herself. Her life, as told in Ellen Kuras’s new film Lee, had until then been a series of brief, if brilliant, dead ends: her stint as a model for Condé Nast, her time as muse and collaborator to the surrealist Man Ray, her career as a photographer of fashion and celebrity. It was only now – crouching for safety in a German dugout and realising the cold and fleshy object beneath her boot was a severed hand – that Miller fully understood that war was the subject for which she and her camera had been searching for years.

Miller had gained her accreditation as a correspondent for British Vogue and her editor could not have been more thrilled by the “great adventure” of her Saint-Malo story. The military authorities, however, were not so impressed. When Miller was discovered, she was put under temporary house arrest and stricter limits were placed on her freedom of movement, and those of her female peers.

The reasoning behind this protocol was, of course, the atavistic assumption that women were the weaker sex, too fragile to cope with the blood and guts of war. But muddled along with that was the more banally practical issue of toilet facilities. The possibility of a woman in a battle zone being forced to relieve herself openly among men was something the squeamish military imagination could not tolerate. Throughout the war, when female correspondents argued for the right to report on equal terms as men, they were told that the “convenience question” – or what the Americans more briskly termed the “latrine business” – made it impossible.

The small and valiant minority who did make their way to the fighting showed exceptional courage and cunning. Not only were they given no access to military transport and accommodation, they were even denied official press briefings, which meant they were frequently in unnecessary peril. But because they were operating below the official radar, these women could get to stories their more privileged male colleagues might miss.

Of course, Karas has given Miller the glory in Lee, but two months before Miller had found herself a private war, Martha Gellhorn had acquired an even more gutsy story. On 6 June 1944, furious that she and every other woman had been banned from covering the Normandy landings, Gellhorn hid herself aboard a US hospital ship and crossed the Channel as a stowaway. She knew she was on the verge of an adventure when she came up on deck and realised her ship was in the middle of “the greatest naval traffic jam in history”. That adventure became more extraordinary still when she was sent ashore with the medical crew to help recover wounded soldiers. Gellhorn was so close to the fighting on Omaha beach that the roar of artillery and the screams of dying soldiers were all but overwhelming.

Related: Surrealism and war: the life of Lee Miller – in pictures

None of the male press corps had yet been permitted onshore and the story Gellhorn filed was far more authentically dramatic than that of her husband, Ernest Hemingway. Even though she was arrested and stripped of her accreditation, her success as a stowaway convinced Gellhorn that rules were there only to be broken. Once she’d escaped her guards, she hitched a flight to Italy (faking a sob story about a missing fiance) and for the rest of her war, she would find sympathetic soldiers who helped her to move from one frontline exploit to the next.

Gellhorn freely admitted the advantage she enjoyed in being “a long-legged blonde”. A few years earlier, her friend Virginia Cowles had scooped one of the great stories of the Spanish civil war when a Soviet general had been so dazzled by her glamour that he’d kept her prisoner in his HQ, feeding her champagne and Marxism for three days and nights in an attempt to convert her to communism.

It was accepted, if not welcomed, by most female correspondents that they sometimes had to trade on their looks. But Clare Hollingworth, who was sent to south-west Poland in late August 1939, got her first headline story through luck, timing and nerve. Not only was she in place on 1 September to phone through an eyewitness account of the start of the German invasion, effectively the beginning of the second world war, she was also able to remain in Poland for the full three weeks it took for that country to fall, driving through air raids and shellings to deliver her exclusives.

Because the British weren’t fighting in Poland, there was no one to curb her activities and Hollingworth would continue to duck and dive her way to parts of the conflict in which allied protocol was not strictly enforced. She became a personal affront to Field Marshal Montgomery. “I’ll have no women in my war!” he roared.

However, for Helen Kirkpatrick, it was the special protection of Supreme Cmdr Eisenhower that opened up her war. She so impressed the American with her grasp of military issues that he gave her special permission to travel with the allies as they fought their way towards Paris. Not only was Kirkpatrick among the very first journalists, male or female, to enter the newly liberated city, she was also one of just two or three reporters present at Notre Dame Cathedral when German snipers opened fire on General de Gaulle while he was leading the French resistance in a service of blessing.

Twenty-five were killed and Kirkpatrick’s report – “Daily News Writer Sees Man Slain at Her Side in Hail of Lead” – made the next morning’s news. By now, the number of intrepid war stories written by women had become so conspicuous that it was hard for the authorities to maintain their ban. When the allies began their push into Germany, a very small number of female correspondents were finally permitted to travel as official press.

The experience was thrilling but terrible, as the horrors of Nazi Germany were revealed. When Miller entered Dachau, just hours after the concentration camp was liberated, it took all her professional control to document its incomprehensible evils, from its piles of skeletal corpses to its “medical” torture chamber and the place where its prisoners were murdered.

Afterwards, when Miller moved on to Munich, she famously ended up in Hitler’s apartment where she was photographed scrubbing the filth of Dachau off herself in Hitler’s bath. That photograph exemplified the triumph of Miller’s war but once the fighting had ended it was a triumph hard to sustain. Many female correspondents lost their jobs, many struggled to adapt to peace, and Miller additionally suffered from what would now be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder.

In her effort to forget the death and destruction she’d witnessed, Miller simply stopped talking about the war, escaping into drink. Only after her death did her son Antony Penrose discover the boxes of photographs and writings she’d kept. He finally understood that his difficult, angry mother had actually been a heroic photojournalist – one whose courage had played a huge role in the battle waged by women for the right to report on war.

• Lee is out now. A major show of Lee Miller’s works is at Tate Britain, London, from 2 October 2025.
• Judith Mackrell is the author of Going With the Boys (published as The Correspondents in the US).